The State is good and democracy is redeemable – The alt can never reject all forms of governmentality it critiques and only democracy can allow a state in which one can live their own life – The Neg’s attempt to destroys democratic forms of governance is life negating and turns the K

This is where democracy comes in. Democracy is a form of government and, like all forms of government, it is not necessary and must justify its own existence. As we have argued in this book, it does so by acknowledging and affirming its own non-necessity: that is, its necessary contingency. It is only democracy that makes of its non-necessity its sole principle. And yet, in contrast to the more familiar image of anarchism, this non-necessity of government is not to be confused with proclaiming the necessity of the absence of government. On the contrary, since our lives are governed by a myriad of agents, including ourselves, we will never be entirely rid of some form of government. The question is then how to adapt government to its own non-necessity or, better, bring this non-necessity into the praxis of government itself. As we have argued, the democratic affirmation of contingency enables free circulation of forms of life while disabling any claim to epistemic, ethical or other privilege of any of these forms. Thus, not every form of life in a democracy is in accordance with democracy: the range of legitimate forms is infi nite but not unlimited. Just as democracy delegitimizes attempts to force the form that captivates us into the lives of others, it legitimizes and affirms what we have called a freeform life, a life that does not sim- ply give itself over to a certain form once and for all, but rather experi- ments with its own living by combining captivation and boredom in an open disposition to the world and all the forms that surge into being within it. In this manner, democracy enables us to govern and possibly change our own lives while to some degree protecting both others and ourselves from the excesses of our captivation. It invites us to hesitate in our very captivation, so as not to exhaust all of our formative force in any present form of life but to retain the potentiality of being otherwise in whatever form we dwell.

This is why we conclude this book by offering a different perspective on the question of the universality of democracy, whose apparent impossibility is often held to disqualify every effort at democracy promotion internationally and weaken support for it domestically. It appears that we can no longer enjoy our democracy if its principle cannot be shown to have universal validity, as if such validity could ever be established for tyrannical or totalitarian regimes. Yet, the very idea of universal validity would apparently contradict the idea of the ontological void at the heart of democracy, whose ontic consequence is precisely the delegiti- mization of any discourse, doctrine or form of life that claims universal validity. Democracy makes legitimate the virtually unrestricted pursuit of incommensurable forms of life on the condition that none of them elevates itself above others by claiming to be essential, proper, necessary or universal. If democracy were then itself a form of life, it could not have universal validity by its own definition. However, as we have shown, democracy does not prescribe any determinate form of life but rather affirms the freedom, equality and community of the most diverse forms. For this reason, democracy need not get embroiled in the aporia of asserting its own universal validity at the same time as it rejects the very idea of it. It is universally practicable not because of the privileged content it prescribes but precisely because it does not prescribe any. From the standpoint of the non-necessity of government, all regimes that found themselves on claims to necessity are illegitimate. It is only democracy that can avoid this illegitimacy by making its non-necessity its sole ground and renouncing all aspirations to give life a proper form

Moreover, as we have argued throughout this book, democracy is not merely a transcendental condition regulating the coexistence of forms of life but can actually pass into their very experience. The experiential correlate of democratic contingency is the human potentiality for distraction, our oscillation between curious captivation in a form of life and a bored withdrawal from it. In contrast to any regime that posits the existence of a proper, authentic or true form of life and thereby attempts to hold life captive in a contingent moment of captivation or even impose this captivity on a life that is bored, indifferent or fugitive, democracy ventures to institutionalize this oscillation between captiva- tion and boredom that defines the formative force of life as the condition of perpetual renewal and transformation in politics. This is what makes democracy enjoyable as a regime that incites and encourages permanent experimentation with living one’s life in a freeform manner without ever really having to settle for any definitive form.

Given that life itself is prone to distraction, captivation and boredom, democracy, which both renders these aspects of life legitimate and protects them against the excesses of government that life can be held captive by, is the one form of government that is, in the Nietzschean terms, good for life, for all life, in whatever form it happens to find itself at the moment. Democracy is more than a mere governmental arrangement that some of us may have become frustrated with and carelessly wish to discard – it is the way to affirm life in the myriad ways of living. For this reason, the negation of democracy is, in a strict sense, life-negating. This is the sole justification that democracy can have and, in fact, the sole justification it needs. If no government is necessary, the best form of government is surely the one that founds itself on its own non-necessity and frees the formative force of life itself to explore its thousand isles.